Thomas Detre

Thomas P. Detre, M.D. (17 May 1924 — 9 October 2010) was a psychiatrist and academic at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, eulogized as the "visionary" leader most responsible for UPMC's transformation, beginning in the 1970s, into the top-flight treatment facility, medical school, and research powerhouse that it is today.

Born "Tamás Feldmeier" to a Hungarian-Jewish family in Budapest, he decided at the age of 14 to become a psychiatrist, and avidly read the works of Sigmund Freud and other medical authors as an adolescent. in 1942 he earned his bachelor's degree in classical languages from the Gymnasium of the Piarist Fathers in Kecskemét, where his father was a widely respected physician.

Having heard eyewitness accounts in Budapest of Nazi atrocities in the East, Tamás warned his parents they would not be safe in Kecskemét after the arrival of the Germans; his father was convinced the community itself, where he had delivered more than 4,000 babies, would permit him no harm. Taking some family jewelry to sell, Tamás fled on his own to Budapest before the Germans arrived in March 1944; after living hand-to-mouth for many months and narrowly avoiding deportation himself, he would discover as a 20-year-old student that his parents and twenty members of his extended family (virtually everyone to whom he was related) had been murdered in Auschwitz. The following year, Tamás formally changed his surname to , a name variably pronounced as DEBT-tree, DEE-tree, or de-TRAY by people who later worked with and knew him. (Although some of Detre's friends believed the name was inspired by the French verb être, "to be", and several obituaries reported this as fact, Detre himself never explained his name's origins.)

While completing his medical studies in Rome in the early 1950s, Detre counseled a small American expatriate clientele which included the writer Claude Fredericks and his 25-year-old friend, the poet James Merrill, who sought Detre's help for writer's block. In his 1993 memoir, A Different Person, Merrill wrote of the lifelong recurring dividend from his early, formal, and painstaking psychoanalysis in Rome with "Dr. Detre", with whom he kept daily appointments throughout 1951-1952 (with Detre saying little or nothing in most sessions).

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